Last of the tough guys
It’s a hot, sunny April afternoon in Beverly Hills and Kirk Douglas has just returned to his home after spending the weekend at his Montecito retreat near Santa Barbara. Some years ago, to be close to his grandchildren, Kirk bought a house in the affluent town 90 minutes outside Los Angeles, where Peter, his youngest son, lives with wife Lisa and their four children.
‘I go to Santa Barbara almost every weekend,’ Kirk tells me with relish, ‘so I can be with my grandchildren. We have lunch together and I watch them play soccer or basketball, and their other sporting events. I’d entertain them but they’re very good at finding their own entertainment. They’ve seen some of my films and the one they like best is 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.’
I venture that they must benefit hugely from the wisdom of his advice. But he denies this, assuring me, ‘I don’t give them advice. I leave that to their parents.’
He has three other grandchildren from son Michael, but they live in New York and Kirk doesn’t get to see them as often as he’d like. He was delighted when Michael’s movie Liberace recently filmed in nearby Las Vegas and he was able to spend time with grandchildren Dylan, 12, and 10-year-old Carys.
When I last saw him a couple of months ago, he’d just finished a gruelling workout with his trainer. His eyes, filled with humour, had twinkled mischievously as the one-time ladies’ man whispered conspiratorially, ‘Of course, my trainer is a woman. But then… what else would you expect from me!’
He looks amazing. In spite of everything he’s been through in the last few decades. His speech is still slurred from the stroke that felled him in 1996, his back still pains him from a helicopter crash, he’s kitted out with a pacemaker, and he’s slower on his feet since having both knees replaced a few years ago, the result of his macho vanity (‘In my youth I always insisted on doing my own stunts, which probably was silly but when you’re young, you’re vain’).
To a lot of people, Kirk Douglas spells Spartacus. To me, he’s Superman. I mean, come on, he is 96, and like the Duracell battery, he keeps going and going and going.
I tell him this and he laughs heartily. ‘It’s because I come from peasant stock! My mother and father were peasants, they escaped from Russia. And for a peasant you had to be a fighter. When I was in college I was an undefeated wrestler so I think the peasant stock was instilled in me.’
A prolific writer with 10 books to his name, he’s currently working on his newest venture, the autobiographical Fragments Of Memory. His last book was published a few months ago to wide acclaim. I Am Spartacus!: Making A Film, Breaking The Blacklist, tells the back story behind the making of his classic film against the sinister backdrop of one of the most infamous periods in American history.
It was not an easy book to write. It took Kirk a year and a half and a lot of emotional toll, as he recalled the events of 50 years ago, events that led to his giving a screen-writing credit to blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, which effectively ended the 13-year-long blacklist.
‘I wrote this book because breaking the blacklist gave me the greatest pride of my career,’ he tells me passionately. ‘It was the most onero we have ever had a period so dark as that. The studios banned everyone who was thought to be a communist. Some went to jail. People committed suicide, people died, people suffered. Many fled to Europe.
Dalton Trumbo moved to Mexico, along with others. It was shattering for families that were affected by the blacklist.’
His production company was making Spartacus and Kirk hired the best writer he knew, Dalton Trumbo, to write the script. But Trumbo was on the blacklist, so he was employed under a pseudonym. It was a time of abject terror and it permeated the industry and America.
There was talk of former Japanese internment camps being converted to imprison the ‘subversives’. Actors had to sign documents stating that they weren’t communists (‘I’m ashamed that I signed one’). People were afraid to talk freely, even in front of friends, for fear they had turned into informers. The country bordered on a state of hysteria.
Douglas was sickened by it all. When the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, suggested that he take the screen credit himself for writing the screenplay, Douglas finally revolted.
‘I was appalled! I thought about it all that night and the next morning I decided to put Dalton Trumbo’s name on the screen as the writer of Spartacus.’
The reaction was swift.
‘Hedda Hopper lambasted me,’ he says ruefully, recollecting the powerful gossip columnist’s public vitriol. ‘She called the picture filth! She encouraged people not to go and see it. She saw this as if we were spreading communism!’
It was one man against much of Hollywood, but that didn’t stop this powerhouse. ‘To be honest, I was scared to death but I insisted on doing it. People warned me my career would come to a halt, but it didn’t. After that the blacklist was broken.’
He recalls one particularly awkward moment early on in the casting of the film (the most expensive film ever made up till then), in which he starred with Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis. ‘Laurence Olivier wanted to play Spartacus,’ he laughs, ‘and it was a bit of a problem for a while. We thought he was too intellectual, and too…’ he breaks off to search for the word, ‘gentle – genteel – for the role. In the end he conceded it to me. Said I looked rougher!’ He breaks off to say goodbye to his wife, who’s about to leave for a lunch appointment. They live in Beverly Hills in a charming but not ostentatious home on one of the wealthiest streets in California. An avid art lover and collector, Kirk has crammed his home with art treasures, from original paintings (Picasso, Dalí, Miró) to bronze sculptures, and the bookcases are filled with huge art tomes.
Kirk’s life in his later years has not been without anguish. He almost broke his back in a helicopter crash in 1991 that killed two people. It changed his life and left him depressed. A stroke a few years later left him for some time without speech and he feared he’d never work again. It compounded his depression to the point where he contemplated suicide. Then his youngest son, Eric, ‘Paramount wanted him to have plastic surgery to fill in the dimple in his chin, but he retained his trademark’ died from an accidental overdose in 2004. (‘I feel guilty that my youngest son lived a life of pain and died before I did,’ he later wrote.) And two years ago, son Michael was diagnosed with throat cancer, from which he’s now in remission.
Above all, humour has been Kirk’s saving grace. For years, he looked and felt younger than his age. Forever young, he hoped he would be. When, at 69, he had to capitulate to a pacemaker (he couldn’t say the word, instead called it ‘my music box’), he was traumatised. Hadn’t everyone been telling him he looked 50? Now here was proof of his mortality. After the pacemaker was inserted, he was struck by the incongruous thought of what would happen when he died: ‘I was glad I’d decided to be cremated; I couldn’t stand the idea of my corpse lying underground, this machine sending little electrical impulses to my dead heart for years until the battery ran down!’
The former Issur Danielovich did not intend to become a movie actor. The son of Russian refugees, he grew up surrounded and encouraged by six sisters. He dreamed of becoming an actor, but it was the stage that beckoned. He won a wrestling scholarship to university and worked as a wrestler in summer carnivals to meet school expenses. A second scholarship, from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, put him on the road to his career and he made his Broadway debut in 1940 as a singing telegram boy in Spring Again.
The war intervened and he enlisted in the US Navy, eventually to be discharged with a war injury. He went back to the theatre but now Hollywood was calling. Paramount wanted him to have plastic surgery to fill in the dimple in his chin, but Kirk fought them and retained the trademark. He landed the key role in The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers and won plaudits for his work and delayed approval from the film’s star, Barbara Stanwyck. (‘Too late!’ he retorted, when she finally complimented him, weeks after he’d suffered her indifference.)
It was his eighth film, Champion, in which he played a rough, selfish boxer, that established him firmly as a tough guy and leading man. Yet his agents had pleaded with him not to make it. ‘They thought I was insane! They had me lined up instead for a big movie with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner.’
Champion made him a star. It also netted him his first Oscar nomination. After that, he varied his performances and was never easily typecast, although his ‘tough’ image largely dominated his career, despite taking on gentler, romantic roles. He may not have thought of himself as ‘the good-looking movie type’ but he was one of the most handsome of Hollywood’s tough guys. And the women knew it. They flocked to his side.
He has won three Academy Award nominations – for Champion, The Bad And The Beautiful and Lust For Life, the one that took the most out of him emotionally. ‘He should have won the Oscar for his portrayal of Van Gogh,’ its director Vincente Minnelli said, and even Kirk thought he’d earned it. He never won an acting Academy Award but in 1996, Steven Spielberg presented him with an honorary Oscar for half a century ‘as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community’.
Kirk with Barbra Paskin
He still feels connected to Hollywood, which he once described as a cruel, unhappy town. ‘Cruelty will always exist to a measure in Hollywood,’ he sighs, when I ask if he still views it in the same light. ‘Because if you want to be an actor you have to love rejection. And Hollywood is filled with rejection. For every star you know, there must be a few hundred people who are rejected.’
So what advice would he give to a young up-and-coming actor today? He smiles wryly. ‘Listen, I stopped giving advice to young actors years ago when my son Michael went to college and I thought he was going to be a lawyer. I was very happy because every father wants his son to be a lawyer or a doctor. But then he was in a college play and I went to see it, a small part in a Shakespearian play. Afterwards he said, “Hey Dad, how was I?”
‘I said, “Michael, you were terrible; I didn’t understand a word that Shakespeare wrote for you.” So I thought that was the end and the start of being a lawyer. But two months later he was in another play and he was fantastic. That’s when I thought he would be an actor. I never tried to encourage him to be an actor. In fact I tried to discourage him!’
Although he never took an official role, Kirk has flown around the world as a goodwill ambassador for the United States. ‘Being a movie star was a great credential,’ he grins. And it’s true that it has given him a unique entrée to the elite of the world. ‘Even presidents and kings and queens love movies!’
In 1980 he flew in the first private jet from Jerusalem to Cairo and met with President Sadat. In 1982 he made a documentary about the plight of the three million Afghanistan refugees who had fled to Pakistan. And back home, he investigated the deplorable state of nursing homes, then testified before Congress about the shocking abuse of the elderly.
He pauses to sip some water. He loves to talk, but it’s arduous. So what, I wonder, gives the man who’s done everything the most satisfaction? Kirk breaks his eye contact with me and turns to look out of the window at the manicured gardens. ‘I’m happy when I can do good things for people,’ he ponders, ‘but the most happiness I get comes from my wife. I lose track of how many times we’ve been married. All I know is that we have been married for 59 years.’
First married to actress Diana Dill for seven years, he’s been married twice to his current wife, Anne. He gives that mischievous smile, which signals a story coming on. ‘We got married, Anne and I, in Las Vegas. We’d met in Paris and she speaks very fine English but when we got married the first time, the justice of the peace said ‘repeat after me – I, Anne, take thee, Kirk, as my lawful wedded husband’ but she misunderstood and said “I take thee, Kirk, as my awful wedded husband”!’
He chuckles merrily. ‘I told her we’d get married again and we did – 50 years later!’
Kirk and Anne renewed their wedding vows in 2004 – ‘we’re still a couple in love’ – Anne converted to Judaism (‘she said I deserved to marry a nice Jewish girl!’). Now it is she instead of Kirk who performs the Friday-night ritual, handed down to him by his mother, of lighting the Sabbath candles. Kirk credits the success of his marriage to two things: the great sense of humour that they share and the space each one gives the other to be their own person.
Every evening, around 6.30pm, for an hour before dinner, they sit together by the fireplace and share the day’s happenings. ‘It’s our Golden Hour. At that moment of the day we’re just two people who love each other.’
Kirk’s philanthropic efforts and charitable donations from his Douglas Foundation are close to his heart. His mother taught him to share with people who have less, and he’s carried that with him throughout his life. Recently, the Foundation gave $50m to the Motion Picture & Television Fund. ‘That made me feel very good because I get my happiness from other people whenever I can do good things.’
He sighs heavily and falls silent for a moment, reflecting. ‘I think sometimes religions don’t emphasise the most important things. If people would be more willing to help their fellow men, that’s a good religion. We must think about other people. We’re all so selfish and too busy.’
They’re all gone now, those Hollywood tough guys of the Golden Age of cinema. John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Gary Cooper. Only Kirk remains. ‘You say I have a positive attitude towards everything,’ he says haltingly. ‘I don’t know that I do. But I’m grateful for everything that has happened to me in life. I’m 96 years old,’ he continues with pride. ‘That’s difficult for me to say because I’m not very good at mathematics… but I know that 96 is four less than 100!’
He hoots with laughter. ‘And I’m still here – so I must be doing something right!’
‘I go to Santa Barbara almost every weekend,’ Kirk tells me with relish, ‘so I can be with my grandchildren. We have lunch together and I watch them play soccer or basketball, and their other sporting events. I’d entertain them but they’re very good at finding their own entertainment. They’ve seen some of my films and the one they like best is 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.’
I venture that they must benefit hugely from the wisdom of his advice. But he denies this, assuring me, ‘I don’t give them advice. I leave that to their parents.’
He has three other grandchildren from son Michael, but they live in New York and Kirk doesn’t get to see them as often as he’d like. He was delighted when Michael’s movie Liberace recently filmed in nearby Las Vegas and he was able to spend time with grandchildren Dylan, 12, and 10-year-old Carys.
When I last saw him a couple of months ago, he’d just finished a gruelling workout with his trainer. His eyes, filled with humour, had twinkled mischievously as the one-time ladies’ man whispered conspiratorially, ‘Of course, my trainer is a woman. But then… what else would you expect from me!’
He looks amazing. In spite of everything he’s been through in the last few decades. His speech is still slurred from the stroke that felled him in 1996, his back still pains him from a helicopter crash, he’s kitted out with a pacemaker, and he’s slower on his feet since having both knees replaced a few years ago, the result of his macho vanity (‘In my youth I always insisted on doing my own stunts, which probably was silly but when you’re young, you’re vain’).
To a lot of people, Kirk Douglas spells Spartacus. To me, he’s Superman. I mean, come on, he is 96, and like the Duracell battery, he keeps going and going and going.
I tell him this and he laughs heartily. ‘It’s because I come from peasant stock! My mother and father were peasants, they escaped from Russia. And for a peasant you had to be a fighter. When I was in college I was an undefeated wrestler so I think the peasant stock was instilled in me.’
A prolific writer with 10 books to his name, he’s currently working on his newest venture, the autobiographical Fragments Of Memory. His last book was published a few months ago to wide acclaim. I Am Spartacus!: Making A Film, Breaking The Blacklist, tells the back story behind the making of his classic film against the sinister backdrop of one of the most infamous periods in American history.
It was not an easy book to write. It took Kirk a year and a half and a lot of emotional toll, as he recalled the events of 50 years ago, events that led to his giving a screen-writing credit to blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, which effectively ended the 13-year-long blacklist.
‘I wrote this book because breaking the blacklist gave me the greatest pride of my career,’ he tells me passionately. ‘It was the most onero we have ever had a period so dark as that. The studios banned everyone who was thought to be a communist. Some went to jail. People committed suicide, people died, people suffered. Many fled to Europe.
Dalton Trumbo moved to Mexico, along with others. It was shattering for families that were affected by the blacklist.’
His production company was making Spartacus and Kirk hired the best writer he knew, Dalton Trumbo, to write the script. But Trumbo was on the blacklist, so he was employed under a pseudonym. It was a time of abject terror and it permeated the industry and America.
There was talk of former Japanese internment camps being converted to imprison the ‘subversives’. Actors had to sign documents stating that they weren’t communists (‘I’m ashamed that I signed one’). People were afraid to talk freely, even in front of friends, for fear they had turned into informers. The country bordered on a state of hysteria.
Douglas was sickened by it all. When the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, suggested that he take the screen credit himself for writing the screenplay, Douglas finally revolted.
‘I was appalled! I thought about it all that night and the next morning I decided to put Dalton Trumbo’s name on the screen as the writer of Spartacus.’
The reaction was swift.
‘Hedda Hopper lambasted me,’ he says ruefully, recollecting the powerful gossip columnist’s public vitriol. ‘She called the picture filth! She encouraged people not to go and see it. She saw this as if we were spreading communism!’
It was one man against much of Hollywood, but that didn’t stop this powerhouse. ‘To be honest, I was scared to death but I insisted on doing it. People warned me my career would come to a halt, but it didn’t. After that the blacklist was broken.’
He recalls one particularly awkward moment early on in the casting of the film (the most expensive film ever made up till then), in which he starred with Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis. ‘Laurence Olivier wanted to play Spartacus,’ he laughs, ‘and it was a bit of a problem for a while. We thought he was too intellectual, and too…’ he breaks off to search for the word, ‘gentle – genteel – for the role. In the end he conceded it to me. Said I looked rougher!’ He breaks off to say goodbye to his wife, who’s about to leave for a lunch appointment. They live in Beverly Hills in a charming but not ostentatious home on one of the wealthiest streets in California. An avid art lover and collector, Kirk has crammed his home with art treasures, from original paintings (Picasso, Dalí, Miró) to bronze sculptures, and the bookcases are filled with huge art tomes.
Kirk’s life in his later years has not been without anguish. He almost broke his back in a helicopter crash in 1991 that killed two people. It changed his life and left him depressed. A stroke a few years later left him for some time without speech and he feared he’d never work again. It compounded his depression to the point where he contemplated suicide. Then his youngest son, Eric, ‘Paramount wanted him to have plastic surgery to fill in the dimple in his chin, but he retained his trademark’ died from an accidental overdose in 2004. (‘I feel guilty that my youngest son lived a life of pain and died before I did,’ he later wrote.) And two years ago, son Michael was diagnosed with throat cancer, from which he’s now in remission.
Above all, humour has been Kirk’s saving grace. For years, he looked and felt younger than his age. Forever young, he hoped he would be. When, at 69, he had to capitulate to a pacemaker (he couldn’t say the word, instead called it ‘my music box’), he was traumatised. Hadn’t everyone been telling him he looked 50? Now here was proof of his mortality. After the pacemaker was inserted, he was struck by the incongruous thought of what would happen when he died: ‘I was glad I’d decided to be cremated; I couldn’t stand the idea of my corpse lying underground, this machine sending little electrical impulses to my dead heart for years until the battery ran down!’
The former Issur Danielovich did not intend to become a movie actor. The son of Russian refugees, he grew up surrounded and encouraged by six sisters. He dreamed of becoming an actor, but it was the stage that beckoned. He won a wrestling scholarship to university and worked as a wrestler in summer carnivals to meet school expenses. A second scholarship, from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, put him on the road to his career and he made his Broadway debut in 1940 as a singing telegram boy in Spring Again.
The war intervened and he enlisted in the US Navy, eventually to be discharged with a war injury. He went back to the theatre but now Hollywood was calling. Paramount wanted him to have plastic surgery to fill in the dimple in his chin, but Kirk fought them and retained the trademark. He landed the key role in The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers and won plaudits for his work and delayed approval from the film’s star, Barbara Stanwyck. (‘Too late!’ he retorted, when she finally complimented him, weeks after he’d suffered her indifference.)
It was his eighth film, Champion, in which he played a rough, selfish boxer, that established him firmly as a tough guy and leading man. Yet his agents had pleaded with him not to make it. ‘They thought I was insane! They had me lined up instead for a big movie with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner.’
Champion made him a star. It also netted him his first Oscar nomination. After that, he varied his performances and was never easily typecast, although his ‘tough’ image largely dominated his career, despite taking on gentler, romantic roles. He may not have thought of himself as ‘the good-looking movie type’ but he was one of the most handsome of Hollywood’s tough guys. And the women knew it. They flocked to his side.
He has won three Academy Award nominations – for Champion, The Bad And The Beautiful and Lust For Life, the one that took the most out of him emotionally. ‘He should have won the Oscar for his portrayal of Van Gogh,’ its director Vincente Minnelli said, and even Kirk thought he’d earned it. He never won an acting Academy Award but in 1996, Steven Spielberg presented him with an honorary Oscar for half a century ‘as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community’.
Kirk with Barbra PaskinHe still feels connected to Hollywood, which he once described as a cruel, unhappy town. ‘Cruelty will always exist to a measure in Hollywood,’ he sighs, when I ask if he still views it in the same light. ‘Because if you want to be an actor you have to love rejection. And Hollywood is filled with rejection. For every star you know, there must be a few hundred people who are rejected.’
So what advice would he give to a young up-and-coming actor today? He smiles wryly. ‘Listen, I stopped giving advice to young actors years ago when my son Michael went to college and I thought he was going to be a lawyer. I was very happy because every father wants his son to be a lawyer or a doctor. But then he was in a college play and I went to see it, a small part in a Shakespearian play. Afterwards he said, “Hey Dad, how was I?”
‘I said, “Michael, you were terrible; I didn’t understand a word that Shakespeare wrote for you.” So I thought that was the end and the start of being a lawyer. But two months later he was in another play and he was fantastic. That’s when I thought he would be an actor. I never tried to encourage him to be an actor. In fact I tried to discourage him!’
Although he never took an official role, Kirk has flown around the world as a goodwill ambassador for the United States. ‘Being a movie star was a great credential,’ he grins. And it’s true that it has given him a unique entrée to the elite of the world. ‘Even presidents and kings and queens love movies!’
In 1980 he flew in the first private jet from Jerusalem to Cairo and met with President Sadat. In 1982 he made a documentary about the plight of the three million Afghanistan refugees who had fled to Pakistan. And back home, he investigated the deplorable state of nursing homes, then testified before Congress about the shocking abuse of the elderly.
He pauses to sip some water. He loves to talk, but it’s arduous. So what, I wonder, gives the man who’s done everything the most satisfaction? Kirk breaks his eye contact with me and turns to look out of the window at the manicured gardens. ‘I’m happy when I can do good things for people,’ he ponders, ‘but the most happiness I get comes from my wife. I lose track of how many times we’ve been married. All I know is that we have been married for 59 years.’
First married to actress Diana Dill for seven years, he’s been married twice to his current wife, Anne. He gives that mischievous smile, which signals a story coming on. ‘We got married, Anne and I, in Las Vegas. We’d met in Paris and she speaks very fine English but when we got married the first time, the justice of the peace said ‘repeat after me – I, Anne, take thee, Kirk, as my lawful wedded husband’ but she misunderstood and said “I take thee, Kirk, as my awful wedded husband”!’
He chuckles merrily. ‘I told her we’d get married again and we did – 50 years later!’
Kirk and Anne renewed their wedding vows in 2004 – ‘we’re still a couple in love’ – Anne converted to Judaism (‘she said I deserved to marry a nice Jewish girl!’). Now it is she instead of Kirk who performs the Friday-night ritual, handed down to him by his mother, of lighting the Sabbath candles. Kirk credits the success of his marriage to two things: the great sense of humour that they share and the space each one gives the other to be their own person.
Every evening, around 6.30pm, for an hour before dinner, they sit together by the fireplace and share the day’s happenings. ‘It’s our Golden Hour. At that moment of the day we’re just two people who love each other.’
Kirk’s philanthropic efforts and charitable donations from his Douglas Foundation are close to his heart. His mother taught him to share with people who have less, and he’s carried that with him throughout his life. Recently, the Foundation gave $50m to the Motion Picture & Television Fund. ‘That made me feel very good because I get my happiness from other people whenever I can do good things.’
He sighs heavily and falls silent for a moment, reflecting. ‘I think sometimes religions don’t emphasise the most important things. If people would be more willing to help their fellow men, that’s a good religion. We must think about other people. We’re all so selfish and too busy.’
They’re all gone now, those Hollywood tough guys of the Golden Age of cinema. John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Gary Cooper. Only Kirk remains. ‘You say I have a positive attitude towards everything,’ he says haltingly. ‘I don’t know that I do. But I’m grateful for everything that has happened to me in life. I’m 96 years old,’ he continues with pride. ‘That’s difficult for me to say because I’m not very good at mathematics… but I know that 96 is four less than 100!’
He hoots with laughter. ‘And I’m still here – so I must be doing something right!’